With travel halted and universities and research institutions shutting down, scientists are having trouble keeping their research running. Here’s why that matters outside the lab.
The EPA has just adopted a rule that limits what kinds of science regulators can use in setting rules. A scholar explains how this shift could impede his work mapping child lead poisoning.
Grant abstracts with more words, more complex language and more storytelling tend to earn more money – even if that’s not exactly what funders say they’d want.
In an era of big scientific collaborations, China’s renegade actions have hurt its reputation. As international researchers back away, it may be the country’s military that ultimately suffers.
Money always seems tight for university scientists. A sociologist conducted hundreds of interviews to see how they think about funding sources and profit motives for basic and applied research.
Science can’t just stay in the ivory tower. But what does impact really mean and how does it happen? A study of more than a decade of ecological fieldwork projects in Bolivia suggests a better way.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal wasn’t a data breach – it was a violation of academic ethics. Maybe it’s universities, not social networks, that need to update their privacy settings.
Research institutes and “centres of excellence” exist around the world to draw talent and to share resources - all with the aim of solving important problems.
Scientists are rewarded with funding and publications when they come up with innovative findings. But in the midst of a ‘reproducibility crisis,’ being new isn’t the only thing to value about research.
We are observing two new phenomena. On one hand doubt is shed on the quality of entire scientific fields or sub-fields. On the other this doubt is played out in the open, in the media and blogosphere.
Science isn’t cold, hard facts uncovered by emotionless robots. Acknowledging how and where values play a role promotes a more realistic view and can advance science’s reputation for reliability.
Recent research suggests that humankind’s origins lay outside of Africa. This is the nature of science: a paradigm that cannot be questioned on a regular basis becomes a dogma.
South Africa’s National Research Foundation will dramatically scale back “incentive” funding to rated researchers, both those who already have a rating and those who will be rated in the future.
Scientific truth is based on a body of research which has been tried and tested by many researchers over time. Peer review filters the good science from the bad.
Previous Vice President of the Academy of Science of South Africa and DSI-NRF SARChI chair in Fungal Genomics, Professor in Genetics, University of Pretoria, University of Pretoria